A handrail drive for an escalator is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,307,920 A. The known handrail drive has a drive device and a counterpressure device. A handrail is guided between the drive device and the counterpressure device, wherein counterpressure rollers of the counterpressure device face the upper face of the handrail. The upper face is denoted as that side of the handrail onto which the users of the person transporting device place their hand in order to hold onto the handrail. Additionally, the drive device comprises supporting rollers which are assigned to a part of the counterpressure rollers, wherein a drive belt runs between the supporting rollers of the drive device and the handrail. The drive belt is also guided around a drive wheel and a tensioning wheel, in order to tension the drive belt. During operation, the counterpressure rollers press the handrail against the driven drive belt, wherein the drive belt is supported by the supporting rollers of the drive device. The pressing force with which the counterpressure rollers act on the handrail is applied by a spring of the counterpressure device.
The handrail drive disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,307,920 A has the drawback that a large overall height is produced, since the counterpressure rollers are initially mounted in a seesaw arrangement, arranged remotely from the upper face of the handrail. This seesaw arrangement is acted upon by the spring of the counterpressure device which is even further away from the upper face of the handrail. Since such handrail drives are generally arranged in the balustrade base, due to their overall height they have to be arranged at the side of the step belt. This inevitably leads to a wider escalator construction. The operators of an escalator or a moving walkway, however, in the case of a predetermined installation width due to the dimensions of the building, desire a step belt or pallet belt which is as wide as possible in order to achieve a conveying power of the person transporting device which is as high as possible and to increase the travelling comfort for the users. Moreover, a handrail drive which is arranged at the side of the step belt may also result in deeper cavities on the structure side, so that the handrail drive, in particular the spring of the handrail drive, has sufficient space.
A further handrail drive for an escalator is disclosed in US 2008/0296125 A1. This handrail drive also has a drive device and a counterpressure device. The counterpressure device contains a loading device and a series of counterpressure rollers, wherein in the operational state, the handrail is arranged between the drive device and the counterpressure device, and thus is able to be guided between the drive device and the counterpressure device. In the operational state the handrail is acted upon by the series of counterpressure rollers against the drive device with a pressing force which is produced by the preloading force of the loading device. In order to achieve an overall height of the handrail drive which is as low as possible, at least one flexible pulling means is arranged between the counterpressure rollers and the loading device, by means of which flexible pulling means the counterpressure rollers are held in position and the preloading force of the loading device may be transmitted to the counterpressure rollers. To this end, the flexible pulling means and/or cable is wound in a meandering manner between deflection rollers and the axles of the counterpressure rollers. By the transmission of the tensioning force by means of a cable, each counterpressure roller is pressed by the same force against the handrail and thus against the drive device. By the deflection rollers being closely adjacent to one another and the arrangement thereof in the vicinity of the axles of the counterpressure rollers, no guides are provided for guiding the axles of the counterpressure rollers within the counterpressure device. It has been proven that the slip behavior of such linear handrail drives does not reduce proportionally relative to the number of counterpressure rollers thereof which are present. Moreover, handrails which are driven by linear handrail drives are generally subjected to greater wear than those which bear against a drive wheel in an arcuate manner, as is disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,937 A.